1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a learning apparatus, a learning method, a recognition apparatus, a recognition method, and a program and, in particular, to a learning method, a recognition apparatus, a recognition method, and a program capable of reliably detecting a target object from an image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Statistical learning based on a Boosting algorithm has been used in a variety of image recognition tasks as an effective machine learning method. For example, as one of such machine learning methods, a statistical machine learning method called “AdaBoost” has been widely used (refer to, for example, Y. Freund, R. Schapire, “Experiments with a new boosting algorithm”, IEEE Int. Conf. on Machine Learning, pp. 148-156, 1996).
In the AdaBoost method, a training image containing the image of a target object to be detected and a training image not containing the image of the target object are used as samples so that a weak learner is generated. A plurality of weak learners are combined so that a strong learner is generated. By using such a strong learner, a target object can be detected from a desired image.